'Port' at the Lyttelton Theatre brings the Lancashire town out of the shadows

So let’s hear it for Stockport! Suddenly – well, perhaps a little slower than that – my home town is making headlines. A play called Port has opened on the National Theatre’s big Lyttelton stage, bringing glowing reviews for the actress who plays the central role, Kate O’Flynn. For me, special credit goes to the play’s dialect coach, who managed to conjure the voices and inflections that surrounded me in my growing years.

Then on ITV there’s the comedy series Great Night Out: four gormless mid-thirties men – Beggsy, Hodge, Glyn and Daz – come together for regular male bonding below the towering red brick of Stockport’s glorious Victorian viaduct.

Yet more. There is an exhibition in London’s Bruton Street called Six Miles South of Manchester of paintings by Helen Clapcott, who brings an almost lyrical beauty to the smoking chimneys and industrial ruins and the very same viaduct. If Manchester belongs to L S Lowry, then Stockport is Helen’s. Not entirely incidentally, Stockport and its art deco cinema is the setting for my novel She’s Leaving Home.

So what is it about the place? It is one of several former industrial towns that circle Manchester – Rochdale, Oldham, Bury, Blackburn are others – whose prosperity declined with the textile industry and who have yet to attract the inward investment that is fuelling Manchester’s rather glitzy revival. It was where Owen Jones, the author of Chavs grew up: a powerful book subtitled The Demonisation of the Working Class. In sum, there’s a dynamic at work here showing that within the deprived and depressed shadows of this rainy town, there’s spirit still. Any or all of which might surprise the softer leafy terrains of the South.

So Stockport is now a name distinctly on the map. But what about Sahel? There’s a puzzle for you, especially if you didn’t study geography at school (or even if you did and the lessons were all about oxbow lakes and the exports of Germany). Sometimes a place looms into our consciousness born of a hundred references in the television news, and brief and unexplained mentions by the commentariat. Let’s face it, there was a time when no one knew where Helmand was. Sahel arrived for me a few weeks ago when I was told to worry about it. So that’s another on the list. Thank goodness for Google. Sahel is not a country or a county or even a district. It is something as ill-defined as an area. It stretches in a huge band across central Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, from northern Senegal to Eritrea, defined by climate and vegetation. That’s clear, then. And I’d only just got used to the Maghreb.

ALL IN A GOOD COURSE

Last week I was a prize. Auctions held for good causes at glamorous locations and with an audience well wined and dined are a good way of raising money. But it’s someone’s task to round up novel and unusual items that might tempt the pockets of people who already have plenty. This is a long and laborious business and takes hours on the phone cajoling friends and contacts for special favours. But the “auction offer” can be spectacular. I have heard people bid for a week in a Tuscan villa; a celebrity chef coming to your home to cook for you and eight friends; prints by Hockney and Paula Rego. And then there’s lunch. I was the lunch. The come-on was the venue: the House of Lords and a tour to go with it. It was all in aid of that wonderful theatre company Shared Experience. The good news is that my lunch went swimmingly, or so I like to think. We chattered non-stop. I learnt lots of things I didn’t know and made contact with people I’d be happy to meet again. There are all sort of ways of meeting agreeable strangers: try being a prize!